Jon
Kennedy, Nanty Glo Home Page webmaster and owner, is a former teen and campus
minister. He began his journalism career as teen columnist for the Nanty Glo Journal
and its sister weekly newspapers from 1957 to '62 and became the Journal's
third editor in 1962 at age 20. He has edited other newspapers and magazines,
and more recently, webzines, ever since. His articles have appeared in the Los
Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Christianity
Today, and many other publications. His Jonals appear here on Mondays, Wednesdays,
and Fridays.

Another
set of redefinitions

My reading yesterday turned
up an interesting elaboration of Friday's discussion of multiple definitions of
words that I'll try to paraphrase in my own terms. The author of the book I was
reading said that some philosophers have described the three foundation premises
of Marxism as "a Christian heresy." Marxism (Communism 101) is thoroughly
atheistic, not only denying the existence of a Creator-God, but actively trying
to counter the consciousness of God throughout the culture, even going so far
as to persecute believers when Communism had its strongest hold on the biggest
bloc of Eastern European and Asia countries. So why it would be considered a "heresy
of Christianity"? It's because Marx proposed direct alternatives to the three
basic facets of Christian worldview: Creation, Fall, and Redemption, which we've
been considering here for some weeks now.

Whereas Christianity
(and its parent religion/worldview, Judaism) considers Creation the beginning
of the material world through the direct action of an all-powerful God, Marxism
proposes that matter is eternal, that it's self-creating and has been the source
("creator") of everything else that exists in the universe. Before Marx,
there had been a philosophy of materialism that proposed that the universe was
entirely matter, but described it as analagous to an infinite machine. Marx feared
that such a "machine" had to have had a yet higher or "farther
back" creator, just as every clock must have its clockmaker, which suggested
a god, so he eliminated the machine and spoke entirely of the matter, the building
blocks as it were, rather than the buildings, as self-created.

Whereas
Christianity explains the existence of all manner of evil (wars, pestilences,
death itself) in the world as a result of the Fall, as consequences of God's image-bearers'
disobedience and attempted usurping of His sovereign Lordship, Marxism identifies
the source of every evil as residing in the institution of private property.

Christianity
holds that Redemption, the third basic tenet of its worldview, is the work of
God through the second person of the Trinity, the Son Jesus Christ, who conquered
death in order to render itthe wages of sinno longer the last word
in human life and more generally, God's cosmos. And as private property is the
source of all evil in the Marxist view, the elimination of private property is
the means of salvation, or redemption in the Marxist worldview. And the means
of private property's elimination is the uprising of the working classes of the
world, or "proletarian revolution." In more sophisticated terms, that
is sometimes recast as "class anarchy."

This demonstrates
again the point I was making Friday, that different views of the world of necessity
come up with different definitions of the terms basic to language and life. But
coincidentally, it's also a handle on what is probably the most robust and culturally
(de)forming worldview still in competition with Christianity in the world. If
the Marxist worldview is the structure on which you'd like to begin thinking analytically,
these three building blocks are your entry steps in that process.

Webmaster
Jon Kennedy

Signs of our
times

In a
nonsmoking area: "If we see smoke, we will assume you are on fire and take appropriate
action."


Sent
by Trudy Myers

Advent thought
for today

I
am very glad that our fashionable fiction seems to be full of a return to paganism,
for it may possibly be the first step of a return to Christianity. Neo-pagans
have sometimes forgotten, when they set out to do everything the old pagans did,
that the final thing the old pagans did was to get christened.

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